Networking in Israel begins, sometimes, with a stranger at a wine festival. A few weeks back, Gabriella Jacobs and her husband walked into the Wine Festival at Jerusalem’s First Station, a cobblestone courtyard strung with lights and packed with tasting glasses, kosher cheese stands, and every variety of person the city has to offer. By the end of the night, a man she had never met had invited her to Shabbat dinner, set up a future wine night, and forwarded her contact information to a friend who wanted to hear about her experience as an olah for a possible interview or podcast.
In her original essay on Israeli networking, Jacobs, a multimedia journalist at The Times of Israel who moved from New York to Israel in 2023, used the encounter to sketch the working theory of Israeli professional life she has been assembling since she landed. The festival is a real recurring event at the First Station complex. The system underneath it has a Hebrew name, and a cost that newcomers who do not already belong to the right group rarely see on the way in.
The Stranger at the Wine Festival
Jacobs was holding a tasting glass and pretending to read the labels when a middle-aged man who had recently made aliyah opened the conversation. That, she notes, is an extremely normal thing to happen in Israel. Within twenty minutes, the two of them had covered aliyah, journalism, law, Jerusalem neighborhoods, professional opportunities, and several mutual acquaintances neither of them had realized they shared. By the end of the night she had an invitation to Shabbat dinner, plans for a future wine night, and contact information that a stranger had decided to forward on her behalf. It was, she writes, the kind of evening where social, professional, and personal life collapse into each other in a way that would feel wildly inappropriate anywhere else.
Just aggressive social improv, sustained eye contact, and an apparently unlimited willingness to discuss your entire life with a total stranger.
The speaker is Gabriella Jacobs, a multimedia journalist at The Times of Israel, a BA student at Tel Aviv University, and a teaching assistant for the Tikvah Fund’s gap-year program, living in Jerusalem with her husband. The wine festival, she writes, crystallized something she still finds difficult to explain to Americans, namely that professional advancement in Israel often has very little to do with the résumés people walk in carrying. The encounter, and the working theory of Israeli professional life that grew out of it, is a fair picture of a job market that the recurring Wine Festival at First Station reliably produces every year.
The System Behind the Serendipity
The pattern has a name. Hebrew-speakers call it protekzia, and Israeli job-market guides written for English-speaking olim describe it in almost identical terms. Networking, a guide published by AliyahPro writes, plays a fundamental role in career advancement and job acquisition, often proving more valuable than traditional application processes. Many positions, the same guide notes, are filled through referrals and personal relationships before they ever reach public job boards.
The jigsaw of inputs Jacobs lists is longer than LinkedIn ever was.
Professional life here often resembles assembling a jigsaw puzzle of part-time jobs, army networks, side projects, freelance work, WhatsApp groups (how I got my current job, actually), and sheer accidental momentum.
The next paragraph names Jacobs as the source, writing in her Times of Israel Blogs essay. The list is striking because it doubles as a working catalog of the informal infrastructures that most American résumés cannot name: army units, side gigs, freelance work, and the WhatsApp groups that often decide who hears about a job first. Jacobs’s own current job, she notes in passing, came through one of those groups.
Formal institutions exist for newcomers who arrive without those networks. Nefesh B’Nefesh, the aliyah organization, advertises over 1,000 job opportunities from more than 280 companies, and groups like Gvahim and The Jewish Agency run placement, mentoring, and retraining programs for new olim. Belong’s olim job-market guide lists the same three organizations as the main formal entry points for English-speaking professionals. The system, in other words, is partly visible and partly hidden. The visible part is the wine festivals, the job fairs, the placement nonprofits, and the well-trafficked platforms. The hidden part is the maze of protekzia referrals, old army WhatsApp threads, family connections, and chance encounters that move most candidates through the actual hiring process.
The Track She Was Raised to Want
The contrast Jacobs keeps returning to is American. In the Modern Orthodox world she grew up in, she writes, there is a track, a very legible one: good grades, the right college, one of approximately four acceptable majors, and then a steady, respectable career culminating in a nice house with a kitchen island. The path, she notes, may be stressful, but it is at least navigable, with very readable signage instructing you on what the next step is.
Israel, by her account, is almost defiantly non-linear by comparison. Degrees matter less than she expected. Titles matter less too. Nobody, she finds, is particularly interested in what her résumé says she should be doing. In its place is a working world built from part-time roles, freelance projects, side hustles, and chance encounters, where the résumé is read less carefully than the WhatsApp thread, and where a stranger at a wine festival can matter more than a decade of strategic LinkedIn updates. She still finds it, on bad days, precarious in ways that make her very American nervous system flicker with anxiety.
What the Warmth Costs
She is not the only oleh to feel that flicker, and she is not the only one to weigh the chaos against the upside. Israeli job-market data confirms both halves of her argument. New olim salaries in the first year range from ₪8,000 to ₪14,000 per month across most sectors, according to Belong. Tech roles, where demand is high, can push starting pay toward ₪25,000 a month. The numbers sit on top of a hiring culture that relocation sites describe as informal, direct, and fast-paced, with fewer rigid hierarchies and a strong emphasis on what a candidate can actually do.
- 30% of highly qualified olim leave Israel within three years, often citing difficulty finding suitable work.
- 8,000 to 14,000 NIS is the typical first-year monthly salary range for new olim outside high-demand tech.
- 25,000 NIS is closer to the starting pay in high-demand sectors like software engineering.
The asymmetry is the part the warm wine-festival evening cannot quite paper over. The same connections-based culture that lets a stranger in a crowd hand over a job lead in twenty minutes also creates, the relocation site MetaIntro notes, “significant disadvantage for new immigrants lacking established networks.” The jeweler line Jacobs floats in the essay captures the upside with a wink: “I genuinely feel like I could wake up tomorrow and decide to become a jeweler instead of a journalist, and while it would be a non-sequitur of some magnitude, after a quick double-take, people would mostly react by saying: ‘Oh nice, my uncle knows someone in diamond dealing, I’ll connect you.'” The freedom is real. So is the catch.
An Unfamiliar Kind of Freedom
The part Jacobs does not want to lose is the part that is hardest to put on a résumé. “I am adaptable,” she writes, and the longer she is in Israel, the more she finds she trusts her own abilities, precisely because she has ended up where she is less through formal pedigree and more through capability, resourcefulness, and the generosity and kindness of connections made in improbable places.
The Israeli work culture the relocation guides describe in formal language lines up with her lived version: informal, direct, and fast-paced, with fewer rigid hierarchies, a strong emphasis on innovation and entrepreneurship, casual dress codes, and flexible hours. Being adaptable and proactive in communication, Belong writes, goes a long way. Jacobs did not need the guide to learn that. The wine festival taught her, in twenty minutes, that what you can actually do in the room matters more than what your CV says you did five years ago.
The contradiction she is honest about is that the same freedom can be paralyzing for anyone who arrived without the right room to walk into. She sometimes misses the clarity of a path that at least tells you where it is going, even if you are not yet sure you want to go there.
Most of the time, the trade feels worth it. The track she was raised to want would have given her a kitchen island. The Israeli version has given her, she writes, a working life where she is no longer sure she would recognize herself on the old one. Few people around her, she notes, would blink if she announced she was switching to diamond dealing tomorrow morning.
What Stays With Her
Her verdict in the essay is undecided. “I’m still not entirely sure this system produces better outcomes,” she writes. “It’s chaotic. It can feel precarious in ways that make my very American nervous system flicker with anxiety.” The line that closes her piece, and the one that sticks, is a small private joke at her own expense: “Which is either personal growth or a side effect of my wine festival purchases. Possibly both.”
The Wine Festival at the First Station returns every year, with its tasting glasses, its kosher cheese, and its accidental networking. The system the festival quietly illustrates will be there with it, warm on the surface, costly in the rooms newcomers do not yet know how to enter.
Jacobs has decided to stay, for now, and write about it from the inside.
Gabriella Jacobs moved from New York to Israel in 2023. She is a multimedia journalist at The Times of Israel, a BA student at Tel Aviv University, double-majoring in Middle Eastern Studies and Philosophy, and also works as a teaching assistant for the Tikvah Fund’s gap-year program. She lives in Jerusalem with her husband.
